Grocery shopping is different than it was even 10 years ago. When I decide to go shopping, I have a different set of steps, some parallel to my old pattern, and some entirely new.

First, find a recipe. I used to browse cookbooks, but now I’m more likely to go to Google with a very rough idea of what I feel like eating. If nothing I find appeals to me, I might think of a recipe I already have. I might go to my Evernote collection of recipes,

I’ve been fully retired for a year and a half now, and I deleted all my teaching files a couple of months ago, so I can’t pass along any specific course materials. For Labour day, though, I’m going to share the distillation of my 40 years of teaching college composition and other language skills to college and university students, and my studies on how people learn to write from two advanced degrees in mid and late career.

Facebook is the new porch, the place where you relax and communicate with friends who drop by. It’s the club for people who don’t “do” clubs, it’s the Social Hour organizations try to set up, it’s the place to mingle. Not all of my friends are “friends, and not all of my “friends” are friends. But what I like is seeing aspects of people I hadn’t previously seen, and feeling connected to them, at least potentially.

When I was in grade 7 we got to use coloured pencils to underline and label the different parts of speech. I enjoyed both the colour and the naming of the parts. When I was teaching writing, I accepted the going theory that teaching grammar didn’t help people learn to write better; direct feedback on their writing helped students improve as writers.

I always felt a bit guilty because I liked knowing how the sentence worked, and being able to name the parts.

I’ve just finished reading the Saturday comics, this fine early August morning, and I saw something upsetting, pervasive, and subliminally powerful. I saw the ongoing American cultural disdain for education. Three of the comics were about how upsetting it is, for their characters, to think of the pain of returning to school. In one, a pleasant-appearing, bohemian-looking teacher eating an ice-cream cone, asks two kids how they are enjoying their summer. Their discussion after is about how disturbing it was to think about returning to school.

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Meet Joan

Joan Vinall-Cox, Ph.D. is a lifelong learner, retired communications professor, and rabid reader who has taught in both the college and university systems. Joan sometimes provides support for those wishing to develop their presenting skills and/or their use of online social applications.
Her Ph.D., in 2004 was an Autoethnographic Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry focused on moving from technophobia to technophilia.
Her interests include Multiple Intelligences, Attention Deficit Disorder and its connection to creativity, Jung, Campbell’s Monomyth, and Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry.